Posts by heyrick

Re: a sticky brown smear

To Serve Man.

Re: taken steps to shut down the Beeper party and indicated that it would continue to do so

"so it's not going to be an open and shut case"

Never is. Then there's the appeal. And if that doesn't work, appealing the appeal, until the other party either runs out of money or dies of boredom...

Re: Where Could This Go?

I don't buy Kindle books (don't have a Kindle), but I do buy music.

Once you've figured out the really shitty interface to Amazon music (*)(#), you'll eventually find a way to download the music as mp3 files to drop into your regular music collection to be played by whatever. They can't remove files you've downloaded and put elsewhere, only stuff you are relying on having hosted in "the cloud" which brings us back to the question of whether or not you own anything that lives in the cloud.

And on that point, I agree with you. You are, at best, "borrowing" on the whims of publishers and service providers, and paying nearly full price for the privilege. So, if you can't locate a copy outside of the app (or an actual physical copy), then indeed you own jack shit.

* - Bandcamp is better, you can get wav and flac and it isn't so horribly painful to try to use.

# - I haven't actually bought anything from Amazon since Google pulled this stunt so maybe it's simpler? Given how much they broke the Music app when they opened up all the albums last year (or was it the year before?), I rather doubt it. When they only had a small selection of albums, it was a lesser choice but it worked and you could download an album and listen to it freely; now you can choose any of the available albums but you can't download most things (streaming only) and it'll often play whatever the hell it feels like playing, which is frequently entirely different artists in entirely different genres. Given that my main use case was to download a couple of albums before heading out with the tractor-mower, you can understand why the shiny new version is a total waste of time.

In short, if it's in the cloud, don't trust it. If you don't have an actual copy (real or digital but as an actual file), you don't have a copy.

Plus the lawyers will have a field day with working out if this is even legit in all the numerous different jurisdictions.

As for over here? Well as I understand it, in France, mandatory arbitration is only for non-domestic/consumer contacts (if both parties agree) and it must be separate to the main contact (thus allowing one the option to disagree without breaking the main contact). I think Germany is stricter in this respect, and I suspect both country's legal systems would frown upon something inserted into a contract that appears designed to impede a person's access to legal remedies.

However, as always, lawyers are expensive and looking stuff up in Google will get you a bunch of answers that contradict each other. ;) So don't assume this even remotely resembles legal advice.

Re: Not because the search engine fails

I should add, one of the main reasons that I started using Bing was because when you're trying to look up part numbers of weird Chinese chips inside things, Google has a horrible spam problem. Follow a link that looks, from the description, that it knows what the chip is and suddenly I'm at a different site, often with a .it domain, that is trying to get me interested in naked people (probably worse but my content blocker killed it). I tried Bing and, actually found datasheets. In Chinese, of course, but some autotranslation got me the gist to know it was Yet Another 8051 Clone from the Middle Kingdom. Google? Had no idea, was being gamed, and didn't seem to care. I dunno, the quality of Google's search has nosedived in recent times. So, no, I'm not sure that "dump it in a big heap and let the search engine sort it out" is a viable proposal for anything.

Re: A quality tester walks into a bar ...

I would like zero beers.

Sometimes entering zero can be amusing when it's expecting a number and it's set up to do something expecting a number greater than zero.

NHS - crumbly hospitals and stressed overworked staff (who were recently on strike over it); schools (ditto); police (will turn up if you dare to misgender a toddler, don't expect them to bother if it's something mundane like shoplifting); etc etc.

With another round of cutbacks to public services and more proposals to alleviate the tax burden of party donors the rich, I think public tax money is already being massively misspent.

Yup. I endured TP5.5 at college. It was good to get to understand the idea of modular programming, declaring variables before use, sanity-preserving variable scope rules... all the sorts of things that home micro BASIC just doesn't do.

But I found the language to be somewhat tedious with the amount of nonstandard extensions required in order to actually do stuff. If I remember correctly there was a weird syntax for passing addresses of things, because Pascal didn't (normally) do such a thing.

One lunchtime wandering around the server drive looking to see what else was available, besides Windows 3.11, I came across TurboC.

And that was a total joy. It was like Pascal with the training wheels removed, and the IDE being able to stop on an error with the offending line highlighted was so far ahead of practically everything else. Bizarre WordStar keypresses aside, that IDE was one of the friendliest text based IDEs I've ever used.

So, yeah, fond memories of Borland. Not so fond of knowing how long ago it was.....

Re: The entire x86-32 platform is declining

"There is really no point holding onto that P4."

Given that it gets used maybe a couple of times per year for the more complicated picture edits I can't do on my phone, and ripping the odd DVD (I mostly watch Netflix these days), it's really not worth the hassle to find and set up something else. Yes, it's a dinosaur. But it's a non-internet-connected extremely low use dinosaur. Its primary purpose in life these days is, um, a weird looking bookshelf. ;)

Re: Encoders

"Back EMF is more than enough to precisely control the motor."

Isn't this pretty much how modern washing machines handle their motors?

Re: irritable vowel syndrome?

Given that I'm currently enjoying air fried chicken nuggets and chips, nicely done and crispy/tender in all the right places...I think maybe you're just doing it wrongly.

As for the AI, artificial for sure but nothing that resembles intelligence.

Re: A future who me?

Swipe-type automangle strikes again!

Re: Dear nyob

"Either way, this a “You Problem”, not a “Them Problem”."

And thinking like that is why this sort of thing continues. It should be perfectly possible to get the same amount of embedded advertising that isn't trying to profile me and isn't dumping lots of cookies on me in order to do so. You'll note that their stuff isn't behind a paywall, it's openly available for people to read. Only, with the caveat that you must either accept cookies or subscribe (which perhaps ought to give a clue as to the value of the advertising/tracking).

https://www.cnil.fr/fr/cookies-et-autres-traceurs/regles/cookies/que-dit-la-loi

Specifically: Aux termes du considérant 42 du RGPD, qui éclaire l’exigence de liberté du consentement posée par son article 4, « le consentement ne devrait pas être considéré comme ayant été donné librement si la personne concernée ne dispose pas d'une véritable liberté de choix ou n'est pas en mesure de refuser ou de retirer son consentement sans subir de préjudice ».

For those who don't read French, Google makes that: Under the terms of recital 42 of the GDPR, which clarifies the requirement of freedom of consent set out in Article 4, “consent should not be considered to have been given freely if the person concerned does not have genuine freedom of choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without suffering detriment .”

Given a choice of accepting all of the tracking cookies or subscribing is not a free choice, therefore one cannot conclude that consent has been given. Thus, I'm inclined to agree with Anon below that this is not legal, but IANAL...

My neighbour is a farmer (actually, they all are). Upon showing us around his shiny new barn (when we were grockle furriners), he was extremely proud of a box in the fridge containing a set of syringes of "pristine selected semen" for shoving into the female pigs. I asked him why it really mattered if the semen was from top class pigs when the critters are going to the abattoir at around five months, it's not as if they exactly get to grow up. He said it made healthier pigs which needed fewer courses of antibiotics.

That was the day I stopped eating pork. Not that I'd imagine things are much different with cows, but hey, I've not had a guided tour of a cow farm nor do I want to. Ignorance is bliss in this case. And, besides, my mother was a veggie so I don't actually eat that much meat. Just the odd burger and various chicken concoctions.

But, yeah, okay dude, it's a squirty thing full of pig cum, I'm really not impressed...

Re: Yankification

Seniors, huh?

Fifth form was so long ago I don't even remember it.

(And why was there an Upper Fifth before Sixth? Was it forbidden to count to seven?)

"narasasium" perhaps?

Re: common

A heatsink is when the chair closest to the radiator gets assigned in seniority rather than need or competence.